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Submission + - World's first fully formally proven OS (theengineer.co.uk) 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Operating systems usually have bugs — the `blue screen of death', the amiga Hand, etc., are known by almost everyone. NICTA's team of researchers has managed to produce an OS kernel that can NEVER crash, and is guaranteed to meet its specification. It is fully formally verified — as such it exceeds the Common Criteria's highest level of assurance.

The researchers used an executable specification written in Haskell, C code that mapped to the Haskell, and the Isabelle theorem prover to generate a machine-checked proof that the C code in the kernel matches the executable and the formal specification of the system.
Games

Making a Game of Hardware Design 60

Posted by Soulskill from the sim-cpu dept.
no-life-guy writes "Researchers at the University of Michigan have developed a web-game to harness the natural human abilities for electronic design automation (EDA). Arguing that people are still much better than computers in games of strategy and visualization, and that we'll do anything as long as it's fun, a group created FunSAT — a game where an average Joe gets to solve a Boolean satisfiability problem. Known as SAT, this problem is an important component in various hardware design tools from formal verification to IC layout to scheduling. The pilot version is a puzzle-like single-player Java app (akin to those addictive web-games), but the researchers envision that it can be extended to a multi-player (and, perhaps, replace WoW as the favorite past-time of the millions), so anybody can be a hardware designer. If anything, this is definitely a great learning tool."
Censorship

New Zealand Introduces Internet Filtering 215

Posted by timothy from the watch-out-it's-catchy dept.
Thomas Beagle writes "The New Zealand government has been stealthily introducing a centralised internet child-pornography specific filtering system. Voluntary for ISPs but not for their users, ISPs representing over 94% of the market are already intending to join. Read the general FAQ and technical FAQ about the proposed Netclean Whitebox implementation."

Comment Re:First post! (Score 1) 248

by psy (#28511053) Attached to: Licensing Issues Shut Down Pandora Outside US

...err, I mean. Isn't this old news?

I though Europe was blocked 2 years or so earlier. Didn't know that France was an exception. Or he was lucky with his IP block being considered American.

Being in Australia i was blocked off 1-2 years ago.

I think the OP was just in a lucky IP range which they finally fixed up.
Earth

Submission + - Amateur spies put North Korea on the map

Submitted by psy
psy writes: The Age is reporting "A group of amateur spies has used Google Earth to provide a rare glimpse inside North Korea, one of the world's most secretive countries. By default the Google Earth map of North Korea is completely bare, with no roads or landmarks labelled. Over two years, US doctoral student Curtis Melvin and other volunteers pored over news reports, images, accounts, books and maps painstakingly identifying and locating thousands of buildings, monuments, missile-storage facilities, mass graves, secret labour camps, palaces, restaurants, tourist sites, main roads and even the entrance to the country's subterranean nuclear test base. The result, North Korea Uncovered, is one of the most detailed maps of North Korea available to the public today. The small file, which can be installed on top of Google Earth, has been downloaded more than 47,000 times since an updated version was released last month.
Mozilla

Firefox Beta Scores 93 On Acid3 Test 282

Posted by CmdrTaco from the scored-worse-on-meth2-test dept.
CodeShark writes "Mozilla released their latest Firefox 3.X beta today (3.5b4), and increased their score on the Acid 3 test to 93 [on my XP laptop], with tests 70, 71, and tests 75-79 being the final challenges. Curiously though, the current release of the top Acid3 performer — Safari — still not only rates higher (I got scores of 99 once and 100 most of the time) but is usually faster by a little (1.1 sec avg. vs. 1.4 over ten runs apiece) but only because the new Firefox beta was all over the map — frequently better by 25% (.85sec) or tanking badly with rendering times in the 2.5 — 3 second range, and both suffer performance hits on one test (#69)."
Businesses

Warner Bros. Acquires The Pirate Bay 348

Posted by Soulskill from the if-you-can't-beat-'em dept.
mlingojones writes "TorrentFreak breaks the news of The Pirate Bay's acquisition by Warner Bros: 'After years of hostility, lawsuits, police raids and heated invective between the two groups, the Pirate Bay has today announced they have settled their differences with US media conglomerate Warner Bros. The largest BitTorrent tracker has sold out to Hollywood and the two have agreed a deal.'"

Comment Re:No Case Under US Law (Score 1) 378

by psy (#27088693) Attached to: Timetable App Developer Gets Nastygram From Transit Sydney

Well I'm qualified as one ... but I don't currently practice law. I'm a university lecturer ... specifically, Information Technology Law and IP Law. So saying 'IAAL' is slightly naughty of me since I'm not actually representing clients et al. at this point, I just have the necessary qualifications.

He used et al - he must be a lawyer :P
The Courts

Halo 3 Criticized In Murder Conviction 839

Posted by Soulskill from the master-chief-charged-as-an-accessory dept.
oldwindways writes "An Ohio teen was found guilty of murdering his mother and shooting his father in the head after they took away his copy of Halo 3. One has to wonder if this is going to have any effect on the games industry. Clearly, the AP thought they could stir up something controversial by asking the IP owner for a statement: 'Microsoft, which owns the intellectual property for the game, declined to comment beyond a statement saying: "We are aware of the situation and it is a tragic case."' I suppose the good news is they did not accept his insanity plea, so no one can claim that Halo 3 drove him insane. Even so, I don't think anything good can come out of this for gamers." Unfortunately, it seems somebody can claim that the game was a contributing factor; the judge who presided over this case said he believes that the 17-year-old defendant "had no idea at the time he hatched this plot that if he killed his parents, they would be dead forever." GamePolitics has further details from the judge's statement. It doesn't help that the boy's lawyers used video game addiction as a defense.
Censorship

IWF Backs Down On Wiki Censorship 226

Posted by kdawson from the that-streisand-thing-again dept.
jonbryce writes "The Internet Watch Foundation, guardians of the Great Firewall of Britain, have stopped censoring Wikipedia for hosting what they considered to be a child porn image. They had previously threatened to block Amazon for hosting the same image." Here is the IWF's statement, which credits the Streisand Effect for opening their eyes: "...in light of the length of time the image has existed and its wide availability, the decision has been taken to remove this webpage from our list. Any further reported instances of this image which are hosted abroad, will not be added to the list. ... IWF's overriding objective is to minimize the availability of indecent images of children on the internet, however, on this occasion our efforts have had the opposite effect."
Censorship

Submission + - Software companies sues popular Australian forum (whirlpool.net.au) 3

Submitted by Pugzly
Pugzly writes: In a recent announcement on the Whirlpool front page, it appears that accounting software maker 2clix is sueing the founder of the forums as the founder "allowed statements 'relating to the Plaintiff and its software product that are both false and malicious' to be published on the Whirlpool forums."
Hopefully sanity will prevail, but it is the legal system...

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